I've only had a smartmeter for a few days, but it's quite alarming how quickly I've become conscious, and slightly competitive, about how I use energy.
The first I knew about it was a letter from my energy supplier, asking if I'd like one and inviting me to call and setup a time for installation, as well as telling me about the benefits, positioned in such a way that there seemed to be no good reason to decline the offer.
The unit itself is a small, quiet electronic device plugged into the wall and about the size of a novel. Most of it a screen, with a handful buttons and an array of coloured lights to tell me its doing its metering things. The engineer that dropped it off also had to install a new electricity meter and gas meter, which appears to communicate and update the unit, basically the user interface, via radio waves (and I'm guessing) every half minute or so.
The advantages of the unit don't stop at the almost realtime measurement of energy use - the genius of it is that from now on I'll be billed exact amounts every month, no more quarterly readings and strange running averages. Again, there is a bit of magic going on here, I assume that there is either a simcard buried inside the smartmeter itself (like a Tomtom or similar navigation unit) and it is phoning home every so often, or that it uses some kind of powerline networking. It seems to occasionally receive messages (displaying a bright blue light) and showing a message roughly the length of an SMS message.
So what does it tell me? It shows how my current energy (electricity and gas) use in kilowatt hours (kw/h) over the last hour, 24 hours, week, month and year, as well as CO2 output over the same period. It also shows the averaged cost for these periods. My energy use is currently averaging about 0.510 kw/h and will continue to be around that until I do something like put the kettle on - at which point the reading jumps to 3.5 kw/h almost instantly, with the happy green light changes to a disapproving orange light.
The main screen of the unit displays this as large set of LCD numbers, changing between pence per hour (9.11), kw/h (still 0.510) and the best part, a scrolling barchart running horizontally with a bar displayed for each minute of so of use. There is something very satisfying about walking around the house, switching lights off and being instantly rewarded with smaller bars on the chart. Equally, it's scary to see that switching off one (tungsten) lightbulb saves more energy than my LCD TV and Xbox use, and terrifying to see what happens when you have the kettle, toaster and oven on at the same time.
Moving the measurement of energy from a small cupboard full of cryptic dials in the hallway to something sitting on the mantelpiece which reacts quickly and obviously has quickly and definitely affected a reaction in the way I perceive my energy use. It will be interesting to see if this is change is permanent or not.